Sixteen
The wedding was ten days away, and Anne Darcy had mastered the curtsy.
Not merely mastered—perfected. She rose from the third repetition with her chin level, her hands folded at her waist, her expression serene. She held the position for a full three seconds before straightening, exactly as Elizabeth had demonstrated.
“Was that right, Miss Bennet?”
“It was faultless, Miss Darcy.”
Anne accepted this verdict with a small, grave nod. She did not beam or clap or bounce on her heels. She simply absorbed the praise and waited for the next instruction.
Elizabeth studied her. The late May sunshine fell warm across the garden, gilding the gravel path and the roses beginning to unfurl along the south wall.
A perfect afternoon for lessons conducted outdoors, away from the nursery’s familiar walls.
Anne stood in a patch of light, her blonde curls bright, her posture immaculate—and far, far too composed for a child of six.
“Shall we practise walking?” Elizabeth gestured to the far end of the path. “At the wedding you must move without rushing, and you must not turn your head to observe the guests, no matter how curious you become.”
“I shall not turn my head.”
“Even if Colonel Fitzwilliam makes a face at you from the pews?”
Anne considered this. “The Colonel would not make faces in church. It would be disrespectful to God.”
“And if he did?”
“Then God would note it in His ledger, and the Colonel would have to answer for it later.” She paused for a second. “I would not wish to be noted in God’s ledger for turning my head. I shall keep my eyes forward.”
Elizabeth pressed her lips together. The logic was impeccable, the delivery earnest, and the child speaking was not yet seven years of age.
She had noticed it before—the gravity, the precision, the way Anne approached every task.
Other children of her years fidgeted, protested, grew bored.
Anne listened, absorbed, and executed. She asked questions not to delay but to understand.
She did not whine or sulk or test boundaries with the cheerful persistence that Elizabeth remembered from her own childhood, from Lydia at this age, from every small creature who had not yet learned that the world would push back.
Anne already knew. Somehow, impossibly, she already knew.
Elizabeth decided that it was not the moment to examine it—not with the sun warm on her shoulders, the lesson half-complete, and the prickling awareness that she was being watched.
She knew, with the certainty of almost three months’ proximity, that Mr Darcy stood at his study window. She could feel the weight of his unrelenting attention on her back, as tangible as the heat of the afternoon.
Her skin warmed, and the sun was not responsible for it.
“Miss Bennet? Shall I walk now?”
“Yes. To the sundial and back. Steady pace. Eyes forward.”
Anne set off down the path, her steps measured, her small shoulders squared. Elizabeth clasped her hands behind her back and watched—and did not watch. Her eyes followed the child, but her mind was elsewhere.
It was in the way he had dropped to his knees before her as though she were something sacred. The sounds that had escaped her throat, broken and desperate, sounds she had not known she could make. The shattering pleasure that had torn through her body and left her gasping, trembling, undone.
And then the flight back to her own room, her heart slamming against her ribs, her legs unsteady. The hours spent staring at the ceiling, replaying every moment, every touch, every word—and the slow, creeping realisation that she had not fled because she was frightened.
She had fled because she wanted more.
The admission had lived inside her for weeks now.
She had turned it over in the dark hours, examined it from every angle, tested its weight.
It did not diminish. It did not fade. It sat in her chest, warm and insistent, and it coloured every glance across the dining table, every accidental brush of fingers when Anne passed between them, every charged silence in a room that had grown too small to contain what neither of them would admit.
She wanted more. She wanted his mouth on hers again. She wanted his hands, his weight, his voice rough against her ear. She wanted to know what came next—what lay beyond the boundary she had crossed and then fled from, what he would do if she stayed.
Anne reached the sundial, pivoted neatly, and began the return journey. Her face was solemn with concentration.
Elizabeth breathed. In. Out. She was standing in a garden in broad daylight, instructing a child in deportment, and her blood was running hot under her skin because a man was watching her from a window forty feet away.
This was untenable. This was madness. This was—
She heard footsteps on the gravel. Long stride, unhurried, approaching from the house.
She did not turn. She kept her eyes on Anne, her hands clasped, her posture irreproachable. The footsteps drew closer and stopped beside her.
“She has improved remarkably.”
His voice was low, warm, carrying the particular resonance it held when he spoke of his daughter. Elizabeth permitted herself to turn.
Mr Darcy stood at her shoulder, his eyes on Anne.
“She is a credit to her own determination, Mr Darcy. I merely provided the instruction.”
“You provided considerably more than instruction.” His eyes remained fixed on Anne, who had spotted him and broken into a run—decorum abandoned, the lesson forgotten, her face alight with uncomplicated joy.
“Papa!”
He caught her as she launched herself at his legs. He lifted her easily, and Anne wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her cheek to his shoulder. The gesture was artless, instinctive—a child seeking her father’s warmth with the absolute confidence that it would be given.
Mr Darcy’s face transformed.
The severity vanished. The guarded composure, the careful blankness he wore in company, the reserve that kept the world at arm’s length, all of it dissolved.
In its place was a softness Elizabeth had glimpsed only in fragments: a smile at Anne’s pronouncements, a gentleness in his voice when he bid her goodnight, the way his hand lingered on her curls when he thought no one observed.
Now she observed. Now she saw the whole of it—the tenderness, the fierce and unguarded love, the way he held his daughter as though she were the axis around which his entire world turned.
Anne whispered in his ear. He listened with grave attention, nodded, whispered back. Anne giggled—a bright, bubbling sound that belonged to the child she was, rather than the composed miniature adult she had been practising.
Elizabeth’s unease about Anne’s maturity faded.
Not answered, not resolved, but set aside.
Whatever had shaped this girl into gravity beyond her years, it had also given her this: a father who adored her without reservation.
A father who would soften his entire countenance for the privilege of holding her.
Anne wriggled to be set down and Mr Darcy obliged. She spotted a butterfly with white wings edged in orange, dancing above the roses, and gave chase.
Elizabeth and Mr Darcy stood side by side, watching her.
Neither spoke. The silence stretched, but it was not the taut silence of the dining room or the hush of a corridor at midnight. It was the quiet of two people who had shared a table for a long time and no longer required words to fill every pause.
Anne darted between the rose beds. The butterfly evaded her with lazy grace. The sun warmed Elizabeth’s face, and beside her, Mr Darcy breathed, steady and present, close enough that she could smell the faint trace of sandalwood and clean linen.
It pained her.
This ease, this rightness. Standing beside him in the late afternoon light, watching his daughter laugh, feeling the warmth of his shoulder inches from her own. It felt like she was made for it, for a space she had been designed to occupy, a shape that matched the shape of her exactly.
And she could not have it. She was his governess, paid to stand in this garden.
The ease between them was an illusion built on proximity and circumstance, and when the circumstances changed—when he married, when the household shifted, when he remembered that she was staff and he was master—the ease would dissolve.
She would be left with nothing but the memory of how it had felt to stand beside him and pretend.
Anne caught the butterfly. Or rather, the butterfly permitted itself to be caught. It landed on her outstretched finger and rested there, wings folding and unfolding, while Anne held utterly still and stared at it with reverent wonder.
“She is very patient.”
“Miss Darcy has many admirable qualities,” she agreed. “Patience among them.”
He turned to her then, with the focused attention that always undid her. He studied her face as though searching for a sign, a signal, some indication of what she was thinking.
She kept her expression neutral.
“Miss Bennet—”
“Papa! The butterfly flew away!”
Anne’s voice broke the moment. Mr Darcy blinked, turned, and smiled at his daughter. The conversation, whatever it might have become, dissolved into the ordinary business of consoling a child whose captive had escaped.
Elizabeth stepped back and she smoothed her skirts. She reminded herself, firmly, that she was a governess in a garden, and that the ache in her chest was not relevant to her duties.
Elizabeth and Anne spent a quiet day. But at half past five, the summons came. Alice appeared in the nursery doorway, breathless from the stairs.
“Begging your pardon, Miss Bennet. The master requests that you bring Miss Anne to the drawing room to greet the guests.”
Anne, who had been building a fortress from blocks next to Muffin, raised her head with interest. “Are there guests, Alice?”
“Yes, miss. Grand ones.”
“How grand?”
“An earl and a countess and a viscount, miss.”